Sierra Nevada

Engineers working for Spaceflight, a Seattle-based launch services company, are in the final steps of preparing for the first launch of new robotic free flyers carrying more than 70 small government and commercial satellites into polar orbit later this year aboard a dedicated flight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

An atmospheric test article of Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser spaceship made a successful runway landing Saturday at Edwards Air Force Base in California after a glide test flight performed to verify the craft’s handling qualities and guidance systems before future resupply missions to the International Space Station.

Sierra Nevada and United Launch Alliance have announced the most powerful version of the Atlas 5 rocket, with five strap-on boosters and a twin-engine upper stage, will send the first two Dream Chaser cargo missions to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral in 2020 and 2021, a schedule that still must be confirmed by NASA.

An atmospheric test model of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spacecraft, a cargo carrier for the International Space Station that will take off on top of an Atlas 5 rocket and land on a runway, is undergoing braking and steering checks in California ahead of a flight test later this year, the company said Monday.

Orbital ATK’s Pegasus XL rocket will take about eight minutes to reach orbit with NASA’s eight CYGNSS weather research microsatellites, then comes deployment of the spacecraft more than 300 miles above Earth.

Spaceflight Now visited the CYGNSS production facility at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and the Pegasus XL rocket’s carrier plane at Cape Canaveral for rare looks at hardware that make NASA’s $157 million hurricane research mission possible.

Eight miniature weather observatories, each the size of a piece of carry-on luggage, were installed on a specially-designed deployer module and mounted on the front end of an air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to prepare for Monday’s flight into orbit.

Eight mini-satellites packed snug inside a Pegasus rocket slung under a modified jumbo jet will fire into orbit Monday off Florida’s East Coast, launching on a $157 million NASA mission that could help forecasters better predict how strong hurricanes will be when they strike land.